A test room in a semiconductor plant in Korea under soft yellow light, on a stainless steel table a round silicon wafer about ten centimetres across standing upright in a clear acrylic holder, dark violet-grey with a fine grid of rectangular chip fields, in front of it on a clear acrylic block two packaged chips two centimetres long, a black plastic one with silvery legs and a pale ceramic one with a gold lid and gold legs, both plain smooth and unmarked, a hand in a white glove setting down a third chip with a slim vacuum wand, a grey test cabinet soft behind.
What it was used for
Samsung Electronics entered the merchant DRAM market in 1983 and built not its own device but a licensed one. A working paper of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy records the sequence: in June 1983 Samsung licensed a DRAM design from Micron Technology, having approached Texas Instruments, Motorola, NEC and Toshiba among others; the process know-how came from Sharp. By November 1983 the 64K DRAM was developed, mass production began in mid-1984, and exports to the USA and Europe started in October 1984. Export revenue was 5.5 million US dollars in 1984 and 12.4 million in 1985.
What was new
What was new was not the device but that it worked at all. By the same working paper, Samsung mastered more than 300 manufacturing steps except 8 key steps, and overcame that obstacle only after 3 experts joined who had worked on the 64K project in the United States and had been trained at Micron - the decisive transfer ran through people, not paper. The barb: Samsung hit the market exactly at its collapse. The price of the 64K DRAM fell, on the same source, from about 3 US dollars in 1984 to about 0.20 US dollars in 1985; millions of dollars of group money were poured into the semiconductor business, and many group affiliates suffered a tight cash flow.
What the sources leave open: The title speaks of the third maker; that Korea was the third country with its own DRAM production after the USA and Japan could not be verified in the sources opened and is therefore not in the text. Samsung's own corporate page gives no date for the 64K DRAM, placing mass production of the 256K device "about 7 months" after the development of the 64K DRAM.